Week 17-23

April 24, 2020

Two and a bit months in and my brain has changed shape - went to get some bread and there was no queue, felt like I'd somehow broken the law by just walking in, paying, then walking out again.

Black Lives Matter

Nothing to be said on this really by me, but seems ridiculous not to mention it. In my lifetime polite protests (Iraq War, Brexit, etc.) don't seem to have done a thing to influence politicians, it's only logical you need to change the script to get things done. I'm just going to keep my ears and eyes open, listen instead of speak, and help where I can.

COVID-19

This government is so morally corrupt it has switched to sacrificing people just to get their polls up instead of getting rid of Dominic fucking Cummings. No words can convey how fucking depressing this is.

Breville Toasties

The Bread was needed for toasties - we dug out the Breville (old school design, check out the next-gen curvaceous new design) and we're having a full on frenzy at the minute - trad cheese and pickle/cheese and ham at the minute, but think we're going to branch out to the real deal this week, cheese and bean!

(later) Cheese and Bean is still a structural nightmare, multiple boiling hot bean juice perimeter breaches occurred, but still a tasty disaster.

Work

I'm managing people again, can't avoid it for ever I guess. Actually quite looking forward to it, it's a small team so not too daunting.

Don Letts' Culture Clash Radio

This is a great show - always loved Don Letts since his days in Big Audio Dynamite, his musical taste is impeccable and this show plays a slice of everything good in music across every genre and period, I always come away from listening to him with a new artist to investigate.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0072pzt

The Midnight Gospel

Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) has a new series on Netflix and I'm not sure it's conventionally "enjoyable" but it's definitely serving some purpose for me at the moment. If I had to describe it I'd say it's a series of abstract animations soundtracked by a conversation between 2 people on powerful hallucinogenics. Maybe it's just nice to see something that doesn't make sense on purpose, as opposed to all the real world stuff that doesn't make sense by accident.

Devs

I've always liked Alex Garland's work* and really enjoyed Devs. As with most of his work it's a synthesis of a lot of current issues - tech & it's harmful narcissistic tendencies, surveillance (nothing is secret) and "deep" questions about causality and free will.

The whole thing was very stylised - cinematography, framing, composition, acting, music, pretty much everything was extremely controlled, at times almost experimental theatre-esque. Garland had obviously made that choice to echo the subject matter and central theme but it's not going to work for everyone. My advice to people was watch the first episode, and if you don't like it you probably won't like the rest of it.

In the end though, does it really have any impact on our lives if we don't have free will? Does 'free will' even a real concept? I kind of feel it's the same a the 'are we living in a simulation?' question - even if we are, unless we can somehow 'end program' and exist outside of it it won't make any difference. We're here now, and that's it.

*Annihilation being the only exception, it just didn't come together for me, but then I didn't like the book that much either. Also interesting that I loved Roadside Picnic which must have influenced it a lot, but hated with a passion Tarkovsky's Stalker which is based on it. If I just hated vague, long, ambient films it would be easy to avoid them, but it's not as simple as that.

Voxel Art

Look at these works of art, just beautiful.

Node 14, ES Modules & React State

Node 14 came out recently, a pretty big step in unifying the front and backend JavaScript worlds. ESM support is still marked as "experimental" and not subject to semantic versioning (?!) but at least it's not hidden away anymore. Having to switch between Common JS and ESM module systems remains the thing in the JS world that still winds me up - obviously there's plenty of ways round it but it's taking years to fix.

Also there seems to be a new React state library, Recoil, which is built by Facebook so is in effect blessed in the React world. It looks interesting at this point. Worth watching.